NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 24, 2026

● ProPublica has just published a blockbuster story all about how the Trump Administration is trying to weaponize family policing and broad, vague definitions of “neglect” to ratchet up deportations. The Obama and Clinton Administrations are not blameless either. Most importantly, it’s all one more consequence of how the child welfare establishment has spent decades confusing poverty with neglect. 

● A Michigan state agency commissioned a report on the horrors inflicted on Native American children in that state’s so-called “boarding schools” in which native children were incarcerated during the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. One of the Michigan institutions didn’t close until 1983. The 300-page report includes accounts from survivors and descendants of survivors. It recommended an official apology from the state. The report is explosive. How explosive? The first thing the state did was try to cover it up.  Fortunately, the online news site Bridge Michigan obtained a copy. They also have a follow-up story. 

● Family policing continues to traumatize Native children, of course. The Imprint reports on a study of the long-term effects. 

● A hideous bill pushed by the family police agency in Tennessee would let the family police effectively jail any foster youth who gets out of line. Two things are striking in this story about the bill from WPLN public radio: 1. While family police agency leaders often make clear how much they hate the parents, rarely do such leaders give away how much they can’t stand the kids – once they’re no longer cute little “kiddos.” 2. The extraordinary response from former foster youth Ella Bat-Ami: 

“We don’t get to make mistakes,” she said. “We don’t get to have temper tantrums. We don’t get to have bad days. We’re not allowed to be children.” … She said that kids like her are living on a knife’s edge — getting into trouble could cost them their home, their foster family, and under a new proposal, their freedom. 

“Foster children are entitled to a childhood in the same way other children are entitled to a childhood,” she said. “It should not be a childhood with the sword of prison dangling over their heads.” 

● How foster care fails generation after generation, abuse in foster care, and the vital role of housing in keeping families together – or keeping them apart – all are illustrated in this column from The Imprint. Read about what it took to keep this family together, and you may find yourself asking a question I’ve posed before: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard? 

● The Imprint reports on a study that finds the rate of non-fatal drug overdoses among foster children is vastly higher than the rate for poor children in general. Intentional overdoses took place more than twice as often as unintentional overdoses. 

The story quotes Dr. Rachel Keefe of Texas Children’s Hospital, who said such a case typically 

“isn’t about chronic substance misuse. It’s about overwhelming feelings — hopelessness, anger, shame, grief — and a young person trying to make the pain stop at that moment,” she said. “When medications are widely available, they are often what gets used.” 

And, of course, since foster youth so often are doped up on psychiatric meds to keep them docile for group home and institution staff, such drugs are more likely to be widely available.

Of course, foster care apologists will rush to claim the disparity is all the fault of the children’s birth parents. But recall the Swedish study, which compared foster youth to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. That study found that the foster children were more than four times more likely to be dead by age 20, and the largest single cause was suicide. 

● For this next story, I’ll just let the ironies speak for thesmevles: The adoptive parents promised Jane a forever family when she was eight years old. But, according to KNXV-TV in Phoenix: 

As she grew into a teenager, her increasingly complicated behavioral health needs made it difficult for her to remain safely at home, according to the couple. DCS became involved. Then, according to the [adoptive parents’] lawsuit "While awaiting placement in a behavioral health inpatient facility,” DCS placed Jane in a group home which “was not qualified or equipped to care for her needs.” 

So she ran away, was raped, and suffered “life-altering injuries.” Again, from the story: 

Jane is now 19 years old and living in a home for seriously mentally ill adults. If they prevail in the lawsuit, Jones told ABC15 they will use the money toward the young woman’s care needs. 

“If she doesn't have us, she's not going to make it,” Jones said.

There are three important new resources out this week: 

● The New York City Family Policy Project has a deep dive into the data on allegations of “educational neglect” in New York City. It turns out that, while the investigations inevitably are likely to inflict trauma, they actually find there is nothing wrong 91.5% of the time – which means all that time has been stolen from finding children in real danger. No wonder about half the states wisely do not include missing school as something to be investigated by the family police. See also the story in the New York Times New York Today newsletter. 

● You may recall the excellent story from The Marshall Project on how the family police harass new mothers who test positive for drug use – even when the test is wrong or the drug is medically prescribed. They’ve followed up with a database on how often such cases are referred for criminal prosecution in each state. 

● The Imprint has published its annual survey of foster home capacity. Mostly, it focuses on how many homes and “providers” there are. But there’s also a state-by-state figure for the snapshot number of children in foster care as of about March 31, 2025 – that’s six months more recent than the federal estimate. Notably, it includes figures from some states that claimed to be unable to provide the same data to the federal government. Two notes of caution: 

--The federal government has specific, if insufficiently stringent, criteria for what constitutes a placement in foster care. When states provide data to anyone else, they can use whatever definitions they want. But the Imprint survey data generally track the official figures pretty closely.

 --The so-called “family separation” index is infernally complex, easy to misunderstand and has other limits. I discuss them here.